Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    4 months ago

    Saw this in passing earlier and I just laughed

    Until indicated otherwise Iā€™m going to presume it was some bizbro PM/PO/whatever pushing it because they really think it should be there ā€œto be able to competeā€ (because of some laughably idiotic misunderstanding of their own value proposition and pitch)

    Tangent: while I mostly run my own servers and services I did a recent assay on whoā€™s reasonable for service shit. Proton kept popping up massively recommended while some occasional critical mentions from folks in anarchist circles, etc - made me a bit šŸ¤Ø and want to dig in more, but also just their product offerings arenā€™t great. Others I poked into are fastmail and tuta - both seem a fair bit better. Might be worth a look

    • jax@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      Proton kept popping up massively recommended while some occasional critical mentions from folks in anarchist circles, etc - made me a bit šŸ¤Ø and want to dig in more,

      No surprise that folks in anarchist circles are skeptical of Proton ha. That said, I do know quite a few people in the email ā€œindustryā€ who are broadly skeptical of Protonā€™s general philosophy/approach to email security, and the way they market their service/offerings.

      Others I poked into are fastmail and tuta - both seem a fair bit better. Might be worth a look

      Fastmail has a great interface and user experience imo, significantly better than any other web client Iā€™ve tried. That said, theyā€™re not end-to-end encrypted, so theyā€™re not really trying to fill the same niche as Proton/Tuta.

      From their website:

      Fastmail customers looking for end-to-end encryption can use PGP or s/mime in many popular 3rd party apps. We donā€™t offer end-to-end encryption in our own apps, as we donā€™t believe it provides a meaningful increase in security for most usersā€¦

      If you donā€™t trust the server, you canā€™t trust it to load uncompromised code, so you should be using a third party app to do end-to-end encryption, which we fully support. And if you really need end-to-end encryption, we highly recommend you donā€™t use email at all and use Signal, which was designed for this kind of use case.

      I honestly donā€™t know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff here (I can barely write functional python scripts lol - so please chime in if Iā€™m completely off base), but this comes across to me as an understandable (and fairly honest) compromise, that is probably adequate for some threat models?

      Last time I used Tuta the user experience was pretty clunky, but afaik it is E2EE, so itā€™s probably a better direct alternative to Proton.

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        4 months ago

        re fastmail, david mentioned a thing I wasnā€™t aware of so theyā€™re off the list now, more or less just going to forget they exist except as a counter-recommendation

        this comes across to me as an understandable (and fairly honest) compromise, that is probably adequate for some threat models?

        theyā€™re sorta saying ā€œyeah just use external GPG like beforeā€

        albeit I will say their reasoning is a bit fucked in the head imo: that ā€œif you canā€™t trust the serverā€ shit applies equally for whether itā€™s serving you up the page elements to do message cryptography, or whether itā€™s serving you up a normal webmail client. I think I know/understand where they meant to go with it, but the wording they picked is quite shit

        I set up a tuta domain for a thing about a month ago. it couldā€™ve been a bit smoother (esp. domain/dns state checks) but I didnā€™t find anything immediately jarringly bad - and I was even drunk at the time (which means my diy-able supergrump comes out about this sort of shit). will see how it goes over some longer use :)